Friday, December 01, 2006

We should not let our response to the AIDS epidemic be determined by our responses to the moral fatuities of many AIDS activists. Cutting through the moral vanity of those who cloak their defences of the Sexual Revolution in purported concern for its stigmatised victims (although we don't see 1/10th of the attention and energy devoted, say, to World Malaria Day), nonetheless there remain millions of people worldwide affected by this disease who need help.

The epidemiologically sensible desire to destigmatise victims of the disease must be kept conceptually distinct from the widespread desire to destigmatise antisocial behaviour such as sexual promsicuity, prostitution and patronage of prostitutes (despite the general tendency in the AIDS community to embrace the euphemism of "commercial sex work"--as though most women condemned to prostitution worldwide had just made a nontraditional career choice of their pure free will).

The fact that so many AIDS activists one encounters in the developed world are themselves primarily cheerleaders for the Sexual Revolution scared into activism by the threat to their own hedonism should not blind us to the fact that suffering caused by this epidemic is part and parcel of a constellation of antisocial and unsustainable sexual and gender attitudes, and that this suffering should therefore be confronted as strongly as those damaging attitudes which help cause it, of which the Sexual Revolution is only the modernist, industrialised variant.